Video safety becomes a recently arising issue in the automobile industry due to the rapid expansion of car ownership worldwide. Increasing driver assistance systems have been developed for security and accident prevention by continuously monitoring the vehicle surroundings and the driving behaviors to detect potential problems in advance. Since most traffic/criminal accidents are caused by vehicles, recognizing and tracking the fleeing vehicles on the roads are of vital importance. In this paper, we propose a vision-based front vehicle detection and fast indexing system using a single car-mounted camera, which tends to be widespread deployed. First, front vehicle candidates are detected by a cascade of Gentle Adaboost classifiers utilizing Histogram of Oriented Gradients features. To improve the detection accuracy, symmetry of taillights are further employed to filter out the false detected candidates. Once a vehicle is detected, the GPS locations are reported to a central server, so that a database of detections can be maintained and can be provided to the related departments for timely retrieving and quickly indexing the searched vehicles on the maps. Experiments conducted on real videos demonstrate that satisfactory results can be obtained by the proposed detection scheme.